Project-Based learning course co-designed with regional enterprises

Project-Based learning (PBL) courses in higher education require the instructor team to be very resourceful, multi-disciplinary intellectual and very inspiring. It also needs student teams to be very proactive, collaborative and good at inquiries. This learning methodology in higher education might be suitable for small-size resource-rich universities, or universities focused on teaching. For large research universities short of resources, how to design and implement PBL course can be challenging for faculty, whose career evaluation metrics are more based on research performance instead of teaching excellence. This work thus explores the methodology of PBL course design for engineering students in large research universities with no adequate resources. We propose a PBL course design methodology with evolving regional entrepreneurs in the instructing team. The methodology includes four parts: a project selection framework focusing on output openness and impact, entrepreneur instructor selection criteria and training system, an incentive system for university faculty, entrepreneur teacher and students, and a platform for project management, file documentation and reuse of the projects' archival data. To test the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, a PBL course was designed and implemented in the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, in the form of a three-week summer school. Two years data was collected through archival course data, interview data of students, faculty and entrepreneurs, and four student survey data. We found that involving entrepreneur instructors in the course added the perceived impact of the projects which makes students more proactive in inquiry and more disciplined in documenting their progress. More results are forthcoming. Need more quantitative data analyses.